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General Advice > Admission to University SET Courses

By Paul French

“The best thing about working in science, engineering and technology (SET) is the creative aspect,” says Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield and former chief judge on Robot Wars. “Science is not about being dogmatic and trotting out old experiments. It’s about being creative and striving to find your Eureka moment, where you gain unique insight into something. Chasing that feeling is like a drug.”

No wonder an increasing number of people are turning to SET degrees. Applications to study physical sciences were 14% higher in 2007 than they were in 2002, with engineering applications up 5% and technologies up 32%, according to UCAS figures.

Meanwhile, The Higher Education Funding Council For England predicts an increase of 9% in the number of students taking Maths in 2009, up to around 7,000 from 5,300 in 2005, with 3.5% more people taking Chemistry and 1.3% extra doing Physics.

So how do you seal a place on one of these increasingly popular courses? What can you expect to find when you get there? And how will they help you get a job?

Science, engineering and technology courses

There are thousands of SET courses available at the 126 universities around the UK. SET encompasses an enormous range of study options from physics, chemistry and biology to engineering to computer science. So whether you dream of curing disease, designing a spaceship or inventing a new version of the internet, doing a SET course can help you get to where you want to be.

“I think SET courses are more valuable than other types of degrees,” says science communication officer for the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester and former SET graduate Marieke Navin.

“Doing a SET course says a lot about you as a person. It demonstrates that you are numerate and good at problem solving and, with so many of people doing arts degrees, it makes you stand out more.”

Doing a SET course also has a wider knock-on effect for the UK economically and culturally, as interest in the subjects is booming in developing nations like China and India.

“It is essential for Britain that more people do SET courses,” says Professor Sharkey. “When I go to China and India and ask who wants to get involved in SET they all leap off their seats and say ‘me, me, me!’ Ask the same question in the UK and three people put their hands up and the rest snigger at them. If Great Britain is to keep its status as a major player in SET, we need to get more people involved.”

University entrance

Entry requirements vary depending on which course and university you are applying to, but as a general rule of thumb, fewer people apply to get onto SET degrees than they do arts and media courses. Although numbers of SET undergraduates are increasing, the proportion of students taking the courses has barely moved over the last decade.

“There’s some confusion over this,” says Professor Sharkey. “Whilst there are more people enrolling on SET courses, there are more people going to university overall and proportionally science is not increasing as much as other subjects.”

That’s not to say you can just post your UCAS application form off and sit back and wait for the approval letter to land on your door mat. You should be sure to build a strong case for your inclusion on your desired course using your personal statement, which you can use to highlight any relevant work experience and actions you’ve taken that demonstrate your commitment to your chosen subject.

“I went to international space camp when I was 16,” says Marieke. “I’d always wanted to be an astronaut and when I was 15 I went to space school at Brunel University. There was an essay writing competition to go to an international camp in the US and I won. We did some simulation shuttle launches and learned about mission control in a space station mock-up. It was brilliant, I ended up with friends all over the world and it also looked good on my application when I came to apply to university.”

Who applies?

To the less well-educated student, SET courses conjure up images of nerds in Red Dwarf t-shirts crammed into lecture halls laughing at jokes about quantum physics. However, these out date stereotypes couldn’t be further from the truth, in the modern day SET setup. Or could they?

“When I first got to Sheffield to do my physics and astronomy degree I thought everyone was an absolute geek,” says Marieke. “They weren’t, of course. After a few weeks I found people who were just like me. There is an element of science which attracts that geeky type of person but you’ll find all kinds of people on SET courses.” “There is still an element of geekyness attached to SET,” agrees Professor Sharkey. “But there’s nothing wrong with being a geek. Although I wasn’t one myself - I was in a Jimi Hendrix-style rock band when I was young - I always liked geeky guys. The great thing about doing a SET course is that, whilst at school you might perhaps not have fitted in with the bigger crowd, when you arrive at university at last you are with your people. It’s exciting to be able to mix with people who share your interests.”

Teamwork

If you thought embarking on a SET career path would mean a lifetime of squirreling yourself away in a corner doing designs and experiments on your own, you’d be quite wrong. Whether you’re designing a building or trying to find a cure for cancer, you’ll need to be able to work as part of a wider team.

“The most enjoyable project I’ve worked on was a robotics exhibition for the Magna Centre near Rotherham,” says Professor Sharkey. “We got a large amount of funding to show science and engineering in the raw."

“We built solar panel robots who fed under light trees and predators who hunted them, put a spike through them and sucked out their battery power like vampires. It was very advanced, with lots of new information for science and technology, and we couldn’t have done it without working as a team. It was exciting to work on an advanced project with people from all different disciplines. I learned a lot.”

Coursework

Most SET courses take three to four years to complete and traditionally feature a heavier workload in terms of on-site hours than arts subjects. However, that can have its advantages, according to Marieke.

“When I was doing my physics degree there was a lot of contact hours,” she says. “We were expected to be in for around 24 hours a week, which was a lot compared to people who were doing history or politics. I felt hard done by until I realized that they were expected to do a lot of reading out of hours, whereas we could pretty much do everything we needed within the contact hours, which frees you up to do things in the evenings and at weekends.”

You can also expect a gentle progression when you first arrive at university to do a SET degree, with the first year mainly being aimed at acclimatization.

“You don’t learn much new stuff in the first year because everyone has done different A-level syllabuses and they just want to get you all up to scratch,” says Marieke. “That was a good thing for me because I was nervous about going to university and it helped me settle in. The second year gets a lot more interesting and by the third and fourth year you’re doing really high level stuff.”

Further study

For many SET undergraduates, the lure of studying a subject in greater detail is a strong one. This brings with it the thrill of exploration, the opportunity to travel and increased chances of getting a job once you’ve finished studying. “Travel and breaking new ground is why it is brilliant to do a PhD,” says Marieke, who began her doctorate in particle physics at the University of Sheffield in 2005 and is putting the finishing touches to her study of neutrinos as we speak. “You are the only person in the university studying your chosen subject and that leads to collaborations with people from all over the world. I went to Japan and Vancouver during the course of my PhD. It was fantastic.”

Job conversion

Many industries worldwide are bemoaning the lack of engineers at present and with interesting developments in science and the worldwide computer boom, the need for strong SET graduates is greater than ever. But that doesn’t mean you can waltz into Arup, CERN or Google, flop your degree certificate down on the table and expect to be handed the keys to the boardroom. To be sure of landing your dream job, you’ll need to put in a bit of extra curricular activity.

“In 2007 I entered a competition called Fame Lab, which was like pop idol for science,” says Marieke. “You had three minutes to wow a panel of judges about a subject of your choice. I talked about the Big Bang and won the regional heat in York and in the national final I talked about the Large Hadron Collider and came second. I really enjoyed doing it and I’m sure it helped me get the job I’m in now.”

Career options

With a SET degree you could end up working on a machine that recreates the conditions experienced just after the big bang or designing a new underground tunnel to help London cope with the Olympic Games. Or you could end up as a judge on Robot Wars.

"I was doing a conference for electrical engineers on biologically inspired robotics when the press got hold of it and I ended up doing a series of interviews,” says Professor Sharkey. “The following week a TV company contacted me and asked me to be a judge on a robotics show they were planning. I was reluctant at first but they convinced me to do it."

"Jeremy Clarkson presented the first series and after the show had aired, lots of young people were coming up to me asking complex questions about robotics. I realised then how important Robot Wars was and I went on to be the chief judge on all 16 series worldwide. After that I went on to present another show called Bright Sparks and have judged robotics competitions all over the world.”

What are you waiting for?

With a SET degree you’ll get the chance to travel, experience new and ground-breaking things and make a decent living but most important of all, you’ll get the chance to change the world. So what are you waiting for?

"In the next couple of years the Large Hadron Collider is going to provide some exciting answers or pose some exciting questions that will help us move forwards,” says Marieke. “Hopefully the work at CERN will help us find out what is dark matter? What is mass? What is dark energy? This is an exciting time to be coming into SET."

Professor Sharkey, who has worked in the field for over 30 years, agrees that the time has never been better to get involved in SET.

"There are 5.4 million service robots in existence at the moment but there will be 17 million by 2015,” he says. “The convergence of technology is so good you can be so creative and people use robots for everything now – pumping petrol, fruit picking, bomb disposal, fire rescue. There is one robot per five members of the Japanese workforce. This is the most exciting time to get into robotics since the very beginning."

To find out more about the computer science department at the University of Sheffield, for whom Professor Sharkey is a media fellow, http://www.shef.ac.uk/dcs/.